CBS All Access Hopes ‘Star Trek’ Original Series Will Help It Boldly Go to 4 Million Subscribers by 2020

Premiere week this fall for the major broadcast networks will have the same “what” (30-plus broadcast premieres) and “when” (late September) as in previous years, but the “where” and “how” will be quite a bit different this time around. In the last year, 1.9 million households have left traditional bundled-TV providers like Comcast and Dish Network, new streaming bundles like YouTube TV and Hulu With Live TV have launched, and digital antennas have become a more viable option.

Depending on your local market, CBS will be available this fall on YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, FuboTV and PlayStation Vue. Those SVOD services include live streaming — important for CBS’s Emmy Awards broadcast on September 17 and NFL games — and episodes of many shows on demand. What Comcast, Dish Network, YouTube TV and the rest will not have, though, is Star Trek: Discovery.

Those platforms will all get the one-hour series premiere on September 24. For the rest of the series, though, you’ll have to subscribe to CBS All Access, which CBS launched in October 2014 and has grown to 1 million-plus subscribers with originals Big Brother: Over the Top and The Good Fight, a deep catalog of past and present CBS programming, and a CBS live feed in most markets.

Decider sat down with Marc DeBevoise, president and COO of CBS Interactive, to talk about how CBS All Access is preparing for the fall TV season and how the CBS broadcast network is adjusting to subscribers going digital.

DECIDER: CBS said in November that CBS All Access had more than 1 million subscribers and you want to be at 4 million subscribers by 2020. Does that mean you need to be growing at around 250,000 net new subscribers a quarter?

MARC DEBEVOISE: There are some seasonal differences, so it may not grow exactly that way. Our stated goal is 4 million subscribers by 2020, which we stated in March 2016, and we have not deviated from that goal.

Do you expect Star Trek: Discovery to be your big driver of new subscribers this fall?

We have our returning shows and new shows this fall, and we have Star Trek: Discovery coming this fall, and we’ll have our first full season of NFL games after only having a few weeks at the end of the season last year on CBS All Access.

We have started doing that recently. If you sign up online for either CBS All Access or Showtime, you’ll see an offer to add the other at the end of the purchase and get a slight discount. It’s too early to say whether that is or isn’t working, but we’re excited about the possibilities.

When you look at the devices people are using to watch CBS All Access, are you seeing much of a move yet from connected TV devices like Roku and Apple TV to smart TVs that have the capability for streaming apps built directly into the TV?

We have not really focused on that as a differentiator as much as mobile vs. desktop vs. television. We have seen devices like Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV become a more robust marketplace for services like ours, but whether it’s a smart TV or a device connected to a TV doesn’t impact us in a big way. Viewing on TVs has been growing and is now upwards of 50 percent, and with live TV it’s upwards of 70 percent.

Your first original was Big Brother: Over the Top. Will that be back later this year, or are you looking at any other reality shows for CBS All Access?

We have renewed The Good Fight for a second season, but we haven’t announced anything else beyond Star Trek: Discovery. I think we will do more things beyond those two projects.

The first three originals were all extensions of CBS/Paramount brands, and I assumed that Young Sheldon, which is a spinoff of The Big Bang Theory, was being developed with an eye to CBS All Access. Was that show always headed for the linear network lineup?

That was always under development for the network. The early reaction to Young Sheldon has been tremendous — 25 million plus plays of the trailer on all platforms. Our view for All Access is not that everything would be a spinoff or an extension as we’ve done so far, but we thought the projects we’ve done would all be impactful with our audience. We thought The Good Fight was very interesting given how popular The Good Wife was. Star Trek is a monster franchise, so you can’t beat that. Big Brother: Over the Top took advantage of the 24/7 live feeds for the previous season of Big Brother, which was already one of the most popular features of CBS All Access. I think you’ll see us do some things that are not related to existing properties. We’re just looking for things that will make people want to subscribe to the service and be happy with using the service.

Are you developing shows separately from CBS’s series development?

We have a small team that sits within All Access but also at the CBS Studio. CBS has 40-something shows and is obviously much larger than what we’re doing, so we’re trying to keep an eye on slightly different projects that we think will fit the premium nature of CBS All Access.

How do people watch CBS All Access? Have you seen use cases emerge where different groups of people are watching the service in distinct ways?

We’ve seen different cohorts of viewing emerge. The big thing is that people who have subscribed and stuck with the service are large consumers of our content. They consume much more content that people who watch the free tier of the service without subscribing. We’re seeing viewing time increases on connected TVs, large numbers of episode views, an increase in live viewing. There are other people who are more interested in daytime viewing or sports viewing, but most people are watching multiple shows on demand.

You had only the trailing five episodes this season for The Big Bang Theory and Mom. Will that be the same this fall, or will you have full current seasons?

One of the things we’re excited about for fall is that we will have the full seasons of all current series. The previous seasons of shows are generally controlled by the studio that makes the show. Where CBS is the studio, we’ll generally have previous seasons on CBS All Access. For other studios, we generally won’t have those previous seasons.

CBS is in all the major streaming bundles except for DirecTV Now. Is that a strategic decision of some sort or a negotiation issue?

CBS was excited to be a part of Hulu’s launch and YouTube TV’s launch this year and Sony PlayStation Vue’s launch a few years ago. We think all of the bundles need CBS, and we want to be a part of those bundles. When the bundles are part of a larger bundled TV carrier — and DirectTV Now, which is part of AT&T is one of those — we often have a larger relationship that takes some time to get to the right deal.

On digital platforms, I have had a lot of frustration seeing the same ads over and over or the ad having a lower streaming quality than the programming. How much evolution will you see this fall with CBS programming on ad-supported services?

It’s a challenge across all of the devices and all of the platforms to make sure that all works correctly. I look at data like view-through and ad completion, and we’re doing incredibly well on those metrics with ad-completion rates in the nineties and high viewability scores. When you see repetitive advertising, that’s either a buyer purposefully buying that frequency or a lighter market for that particular type of provider at that particular moment. We feel good about our diversity of advertisers across our services including on CBS All Access, but that’s something we’re conscious is out there.

Almost all of the big summer movies this year are based on existing properties. Star Trek: Discovery, your bill fall show, is based on an existing property. Are you concerned at all about how difficult it is to get through the noise without an existing brand attached?

We’re at Peak TV with 400 or 500 shows a year, so getting through with anything is hard. We like the machine we have at CBS — the largest broadcast network, the No. 1 digital property and not shared with other networks like Hulu, and 350 million social followers across our brands. We have to nice footprint to be able to launch new products, we’re constantly looking for what will resonate with consumers. Sometimes that an existing property, and sometimes that’s something new. Shows that come with a history are still new. If you’ve seen the trailer for Star Trek: Discovery, you can see that Soniqua Martin-Green is a unique star and you see a show that’s going to look different and feel different than anything that came before.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.